Start Windows XP faster

According to Microsoft, it should take, at most, 30 seconds for Windows XP to start.

Under ideal laboratory conditions, perhaps. In the real world, not even brand-new computers with a freshly installed operating system boot up that quickly.

Before optimisation, our high-end reference system took 68 seconds to boot, but a few adjustments cut that to 43 seconds – a boost of 38.2 per cent.

It’s not always as quick as this, obviously, and the only way to make it quicker is to not shut down the PC at all, but rather to wake it from Standby, which only takes 10 seconds.

So if you’re really in a hurry, don’t turn off your PC completely; just put it into Standby.

This can make a real difference to the timings. In our tests, a notebook woke from Standby in about eight seconds compared with 109 seconds from cold and 81 seconds after optimisation.

Booting from power-saving hibernation (which uses about 5W) takes only 22 seconds.

Shutting down quickly and safely
Not quite such a time waster, but no less irritating, is slow shutdown. The worst delays are caused by unloading user profiles and closing down all the background processes.

Optimisation can help speed this up, too.

With a few tweaks, we accelerated shutdown on three PCs by up to 30.3 per cent – a significant increase. The high-end system shut down an astonishing 56.5 per cent faster.

Warning: although PCW has exhaustively tested the tips in this article, editing Registry entries carries a certain amount of risk, and you should back up your system before making changes.

The 10-second start-up
With a few tricks you can persuade almost any PC to start up between 20 and 40 per cent faster. It’s quick and easy to do.

Windows XP doesn’t necessarily require a long time to boot. Our testers reduced the cold-start time for Windows by between 20 and 40 per cent.

The tweaked high-end computer, for example, started 38 per cent faster, with a freshly installed operating system.

On a test notebook, a normal start-up took 109 seconds, but waking from standby took only eight seconds – saving 93 per cent at a stroke.